In an interview with Robert Siegel on yesterday's All Things Considered that read like a rejected script from Law and Order. California Representative Jane Harman traps herself in a contradiction. She claims to have no knowledge of conversations she had which had been recorded in an FISA approved wiretap. Yet she remembers they were with an American Citizen which would put them outside the jurisdiction of the FISA court.
Harman "No. I can't recall with any specificity a conversation I may have had four years ago. That is why I have asked Attorney General Holder to release any transcripts that he has that involve wiretaps of me. And, by the way, there's a question about whether they were legal, and there's another question about whether other members of Congress, who also talk regularly to advocacy groups and constituency groups, might have been picked up and may be wiretapped even now or maybe I'm even wiretapped now. I can't tell you with any specificity what the government did, since the first news I had about any of this was last Thursday night."
Siegel" But, indeed, if what happened was, initially, your phone wasn't tapped [and that] the person you were talking with was being tapped — and if that was an investigation of a foreign agent, is it realistic to think that anybody is going to release a completely unredacted transcript of that conversation?"
Harman "Well, let's find out. I mean, the person I was talking to was an American citizen. I know something about the law and wiretaps. There are two ways you do it. One is you get a FISA warrant, which has to start with a foreign suspected terrorist, a non-American foreigner. If this was FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that would have had to happen."
How does one not remember a conversation, yet remembers that it was with a US citizen?
Siegel fails in his follow up to catch her in her lie.
Harman tries to claim the whole thing is a moot point because she should have not been wiretapped in the first place.
Full transcript here.
One former governor of Illinois must be smiling at this moment.